This is mine, still haunting me, has come back to my mind recently. This guy tells me over the phone that he has new supply. I reply we should cut contact and I will drop off my copy of his flat key in the mail. He insists we should talk about things in person.
I go to his place, I want to give him the key. He says we will stay friends, so he wants me to keep the key as a sign of his trust, we have “a special connection” that he doesn’t have with the new supply or anybody else. He is very calm, I am upset and sad. I cry and I tell him he has treated me badly, none of this makes any sense etc. He doesn’t like that, so he starts turning away from me while he’s talking, I have to keep moving around him, otherwise I’m looking at the back of his head. I pat his arm: “Can you try to look at me while you’re talking to me?”
He takes a step back and yells: “I thought you had a fork in your hand and you were going to stab me with it! I was so scared right now!” There is nothing in my hand. But he continues to babble about the imaginary fork, that I have scared him, he has never been so scared before in his life. “You should give me my flat key now, who knows what you were going to do with it!” He says I triggered his trauma (he had all these stories of being abused and beaten by his parents and exes.) I give him the key, I apologise profusely for scaring him. I cry even more. He is very stern and aloof now. I ask him to please believe me that I would never hurt him or anyone. He replies “Never mind, I can’t say that, but we’re OK now, we can still be friends”. I leave in a state of confusion.
After that I kept replaying the “fork” incident in my mind, and cried my eyes out. The guilt over thinking I’ve scared him plunged me into depression. I kept thinking of that small arm pat and whether it could’ve been construed as a violent gesture by anyone, whether I am an abusive woman. Maybe it wasn’t a pat? Maybe I hit him and my mind is misremembering? Maybe I did have a fork? I questioned my own memories. Why a fork? Why a stabbing? Why would his mind go there? (It seems weird I valued his perspective over mine, but this was after 3 years of constant manipulation and gaslighting.)
In the following weeks he called me a few times, but I didn’t answer. I wondered why he would call me if I was so scary and abusive. Later on we spoke again casually because I was foolishly still looking for "an answer". Within 2 sentences he was inviting me to drop by at his place for a friendly chat. I refused and asked why he would want in his house a woman who scared him and made him think of stabbings? He claimed he didn’t remember the incident initially, then he shrugged. “It was just a feeling I had. You can’t blame people for their feelings. Why are you still thinking about it? It was fine, nobody got stabbed.”